Published: November 5 2004 17:28 | Last updated: November 5 2004 17:28

 

When Oh Yeon-ho worked for the small leftwing magazine The Monthly Mahl in the late 1980s, he was regularly shunned by snobbish reporters from conservative papers and excluded from government pressrooms.

His annoyance gnawed away until he one day resolved: "Every citizen is a reporter" - the idea on which his pioneering news service is based.

Now Mr Oh is having the last laugh. His OhmyNews website is revolutionising South Korea's media world, taking on the traditional press and engaging swathes of young Koreans in politics.

"From that time I have felt Korea's media market is very conservative so I've been trying to make it equal," Mr Oh says at the website's modest offices in downtown Seoul. "Our readers have high loyalty because the mainstream media ignores their voices."

OhmyNews carries news as well as opinion pieces, film reviews and travel stories. It has 40 staff reporters, fact-checkers and subeditors but, unlike traditional news organisations, 80 per cent of its content comes from "citizen reporters" - ordinary Koreans writing about things that matter to them.

OhmyNews started with just 700 citizen reporters four years ago but now has more than 35,000. Three-quarters are male, while the same proportion are in their 20s or 30s.

"Reporters are not some exotic species, they are everyone who has news stories and shares them with others," says Mr Oh.

Politics is the site's dominant theme. There has been a sharp increase in citizen reporters after each election, and the website scored an unparalleled coup after last year's presidential elections, in which it strongly favoured underdog candidate Roh Moo-hyun. When he won, Mr Roh gave his first interview to OhmyNews.

Yoon Young-Chul, professor of media studies at Yonsei University, says OhmyNews has exerted "a formidable influence" on South Korean journalism. "It played a significant role in mobilising the anti-establishment public opinion which certainly helped Roh win the last presidential election," he says.

Although the tipping service has now been introduced and citizen reporters earn Won20,000 ($19, €14, ￡10) for top stories, money is not their motivation, says Jean K. Min, the site's international director. Instead, the OhmyNews format draws people to write, especially the instant feedback through blog-like comments under stories and "eyeballs" marking the number of clicks.

"Our citizen reporters are just crazy about eyeballs - there's a real sense of empowerment by participating," Mr Min says.

Lee Bong-Ryul, a 34-year-old semiconductor engineer in Kyongki province, started writing for OhmyNews four years ago. "As the readers of OhmyNews have grown, I've come to enjoy sharing my opinion with others and been motivated by the fact that my opinion can affect this society at least a little bit," he explains.

Eyeballs appeal not only to reporters' egos but to advertisers as well. About 70 per cent of income comes from advertising, including from the traditionally conservative chaebol - family-run conglomerates - such as Samsung and LG. Another 20 per cent is earned through selling content to the likes of Naver, the number one portal, and Yahoo Korea. Donations top up the rest.

"We saw last week [through the tipping frenzy] that revenues could dramatically increase," Mr Min says. Launched with Won100m from Mr Oh and his friends, OhmyNews moved into profit last year, making a modest Won200m, and that is expected to double this year.

With endless blogs and news sites crowding the internet, what is the secret of OhmyNews's success?

Korea-specific factors have a lot to do with it. As well as the overwhelming dominance of conservative papers, three-quarters of homes have broadband access and Korea is a homogeneous and unipolar society - one issue can engulf the entire nation in a day or two.

Global interest in the idea is growing. Last month Mr Oh spoke to the Oslo Editors' Forum and he has been invited to Harvard next month and the London School of Economics in January. Exporting the business model, not to mention the software, could bring in much more revenue.

But there are some doubts over whether this very Korean idea will work abroad. A Japanese website based on OhmyNews, Janjan, has been launched but has not been successful.

"What has been unique in South Korea for the past few years has been the three-way alliance between the ruling regime, movement groups and pro-government news media," says Yonsei's Prof Yoon."That is one reason we do not see sites such as OhmyNews in other internet-advanced nations."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

 

Thursday July 22, 2004

The Guardian

Here's your chance to take on Rupert Murdoch, influence the election of our next prime minister, and pioneer what has been called "the future of journalism" in the UK. It sounds a tall order, but Oh Yeon Ho, president and founder of OhmyNews, has already done the equivalent in South Korea.

This summer, he told his story at the World Association of Newspapers Conference in Istanbul, before visiting the UK, the US and other places with a simple proposition: if it works in Korea, why couldn't it work here?

What makes OhmyNews special is the idea that every citizen is a reporter: it's no longer restricted to a chosen few as it was in the past. Oh says: "We have over 33,000 citizen reporters - we started with 727 - and about 17,000 have written at least one article."

The online OhmyNews has been hugely popular with readers, who have participated further by adding hundreds of thousands of comments to stories, and giving them a thumbs up or down. The website is changing "news as lecture" to "news as debate".

Oh, already an experienced journalist in South Korea, developed the idea for OhmyNews in the US, while studying for a master's degree at Regent University in Virginia. He launched it in Seoul at 2.22pm on February 22, 2000, and it soon became one of the country's most influential publications. Whether the English-language international edition, unveiled in February, can repeat that success is open to doubt, but it is certainly stimulating debate about the future of mass media.

I caught up with Oh and the director of his new international division, Jean K Min, in a London hotel, while they were travelling between Turkey and the US. The interview was arranged and attended by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and filmed by more staff from OhmyNews. They seem to be interviewing me about the state of the UK market almost as much as I am interviewing them.

"First of all, I just want to see newspapers like OhmyNews in other countries," says Oh. "We started OhmyNews not only to make money, but also to spread our philosophy, which is 'citizen participatory journalism'. With the internet, we can change journalism. In the 21st century, everyone can be a reporter any time they want.

Everyone can write news stores and share them with others. So, we are looking for other countries to import our business model. If we can make money in the process, that would also be good."

Min chips in with the sales pitch: OhmyNews has server software that it has spent four years developing. He says: "It's not just selling the software, it includes consulting and services as a package. If anyone wants to set up an internet news venture like OhmyNews, the software is proven and tested: it contains a lot of know-how."

Of course, many in the west think we already have citizen reporters: we call them bloggers. "Blogging is quite different," says Min. "One reason why people write for us is that they can get huge numbers of eyeballs, sometimes 100,000 clicks for a single story, if it makes the top [of the page]. If you want to make your name, this is the place!"

They probably don't do it for the money, as the fee to a citizen reporter is small. "If the article goes up to Top News, we pay 20,000 won, about $17," Oh told his audience in Turkey.

"I think citizens like to write their own articles, but simultaneously, they like to be edited by professional reporters," Oh adds. "OhmyNews is a kind of combination of the merits of the blog and the merits of the newspaper. We know what the netizen wants: at the end of every article we have a comment area, and one issue had 85,000 comments. That story began with a suggestion from a citizen reporter, and citizens commented, so it's a unique way to generate a lot of content."

And a lot of eyeballs, which is what appeals to a lot of advertisers. One key difference between OhmyNews and the average blog is that it is professionally produced. "Even though a citizen reporter writes his own article, it will be edited by a professional editor from the OhmyNews staff, and beautifully presented," says Min. The staff do the fact checking, and fix any typos.

How much can be checked is another matter - even respected American papers have been hoaxed by their own reporters. Letting any citizen write stories looks like an open invitation for people to settle old scores, or for companies to hype their own products. The Citizen Reporter's Agreement tries to defend against these problems by insisting that "citizen reporters who work in the field of public relations or marketing will disclose this fact to their readers". It also insists that legal responsibility for things like plagiarism and defamation "lie entirely with the citizen reporter".

Apparently only a few articles have ended up in court.

"Maybe about 70% of citizen reports are about everyday life. The others are about social issues, political issues, sometimes economic issues," says Oh. "They write what they can write," adds Min. "There has been some misunderstanding among western journalists who say 'How can citizen reporters write professional stories, reporting style?' Not many people can do that, actually!"

Fortunately, they do not have to. It is not what OhmyNews wants. "Our main concept is the citizen reporter," says Oh. "Our second concept is: demolish the news-writing formula. We say: 'Please communicate in your style: if it is convenient for you, that's fine. Don't just follow the professional reporters'."

OhmyNews's 35 staff reporters write stories that would be hard for citizen reporters to tackle without the facilities and support of a professional news organisation. However, Oh reckons that about 80% of each day's stories are written by citizen reporters, and he points out that about 80% of the staff journalists were recruited from the ranks of citizen reporters.

According to OhmyNews research, citizen reporters are overwhelmingly male (76.6%) and mostly young: almost 40% are aged 20-29. By occupation, the biggest contributors are students (19.7%) and office workers (15.5%), plus a sizeable chunk of journalists (7.1%). It was the fact that OhmyNews had so many young reporters that led to the paper's extensive reporting of Roh Moo Hyun's successful election campaign, because he was particularly popular with young voters. How much influence this had on the result is a moot point, but the established press clearly missed its significance.

As OhmyNews has grown, it has expanded into other media. "Many people focus on the citizen reporter aspect of OhmyNews," says Min, "but we have a lot of other features. We provide web-casting, web radio, sometimes text-casting, and a weekly print version, so we have multimedia sources complementing one another. Live web-casting is immense. We were web-casting a huge protest in Seoul [against impeaching President Roh] for 10 hours: people were hooked all day long, and it became more like a chat board in the end."

"Citizen reporters can now be broadcasting reporters: we just started Citizen Anchor News, and chose several people as anchors for 20-minute programs," says Oh. OhmyNews is also planning to pick up more photos from camera phones.

"Every Korean teenager and 20-something carries a camera phone, so it's ideal for OhmyNews," says Min. "Next year we will make the third generation internet newspaper, and multimedia is a core part of that." There are many reasons why OhmyNews has worked well in South Korea. Oh's list includes frustration with the country's conservative mainstream media and the superiority of its internet infrastructure - more than 75% have broadband. It's also a compact and homogenous society where, in Oh's words, "the country can be engulfed by a couple of issues".

That suggests Japan might be a good bet, and an OhmyNews-style publication, Jan Jan, is already being tried there. However, Oh reckons it is not yet a success.

Could it work as well in countries that are more diverse and already have a wide range of alternative media, such as the UK or even the US? I suspect not, but online news expert Dan Gillmor, who was one of the first to report OhmyNews for the San Jose Mercury, is more optimistic. "I admire what Mr Oh and his colleagues have accomplished," he says.

"And while the conditions are different in the US, including the overwhelming number of personal journalism sites (blogs, etc) that have already sprung up, I do believe an OhmyNews-like operation could succeed here." Its best chance may just have gone. There was a huge amount of frustration with US media over the coverage of the war in Iraq, which could have provided a platform for something like OhmyNews. Instead, it fuelled the growth of blogging, and benefited non-US publications such as Guardian Unlimited.

But given America's propensities for overseas adventures and political scandals, there may well be another opportunity before too long.

June 18, 2004June 18 - Oh Yeon Ho is a lean, intense journalist who came of age during turbulent political unrest in Korea in the mid-'80s-and a media environment in which old-line and often conservative newspapers dominated the national scene. For a decade, Oh worked as a conventional magazine journalist, but in early 2000 he launched his own news site-just before the bursting of the Internet bubble. But unlike many startups, Oh’s OhmyNews.com not only survived but thrived, based on the simple notion that “every citizen is a reporter.” And now Oh’s Internet creation has attracted the attention of media giants around the world who wonder: is this Korean start-up the future of journalism?

The initial premise is conventional: OhmyNews employs 25 trained reporters who cover the major news stories of the day. But the twist comes with another 10 editors who review and post as many as 200 articles written daily by nearly 33,000 “citizen journalists”-anyone who registers can submit a 750-word piece in exchange for a few dollars per story. If the article makes the “Top News” section, the payout is about $11.

“They are writing articles to change the world, not to earn money,” says Oh. His contributors must agree to a code of ethics and eschew racism or pornography. Every story is posted instantly to the site. There is, however, an editorial hierarchy to the site’s visual design. Hard news (by the site’s professional journalists) and the most carefully edited citizen pieces are front and center, followed by softer stories like entertainment, quick community updates and finally, toward the bottom, stories not yet edited by OhmyNews. Most stories are also accompanied by rich and densely populated message boards.

OhmyNews has become one of the most influential news and information sites in Korea, with more than 750,000 unique users per day-this during a period when the leading newspapers’ circulation dropped by a third. The site was widely credited with influencing South Korea’s election of President Roh Moo-hyun; Roh granted his first postelection interview to OhmyNews. The later protest rallies that came with Roh’s impeachment trial were covered in minute-by-minute detail, in text, photography and even video, by dozens of citizen reporters. Oh explains, “OhmyNews is a kind of public square in which the reform-minded generation meet and talk with each other and find confidence. The message they find here: we are not alone. We can change this society.”

OhmyNews reached profitability last fall, driven primarily by advertising (ranging from small merchants to Samsung) with additional revenue from conferences, content licenses and voluntary donations from users. Although ad revenue is expected to grow 50 percent this year, Oh suspects that remaining profitable will remain a challenge. “I have to make money,” he says, “but I am not an expert in that. Deep in my heart, I am still a reporter.”

Critics from traditional news publishers in Korea charge that OhmyNews confuses message board posting with news, and that getting to the truth in any story requires painstaking reporting and editing by trained professionals. But OhmyNews’s audience-primarily in their 20s and 30s-may not agree. When some Yonsei University students recently met with a visiting reporter to discuss the future of news, one psychology major put it simply: “How can you ever get truth from one source- The Internet allows us to check multiple sources, to explore message-board postings, to debate issues with others-that is the only way to find truth. And besides, what good is information if you can’t react to it?” “We’re not stupid,” added a business student. “We know that there is a difference between a message board, a traditional journal and OhmyNews. But by putting them together, our understanding is better. We can piece together truth.” Oh is quick to point out that in four years, Ohmynews has had to publish only four retractions and has never had any significant legal issues.

In some ways, Oh says, OhmyNews is a “special product of Korea.” Koreans had relatively little public access to open and free dialogue and a large portion had grown dissatisfied with the mainstream conservative media. In addition, Korea’s small size makes news coverage more manageable-one of Oh’s professional journalists is rarely more than a few hours away from where a citizen journalist is reporting. Korea is also, in Oh’s words, “a unipolar society, where the entire country can be engulfed by just a couple of issues.” And finally, the nearly 70 percent penetration of broadband Internet access in Korea allows users to engage more readily; Oh can also experiment in multimedia offerings such as OhmyTV and Web radio. Despite these unique factors in Korea, Oh strongly believes that there is a global need to broaden the definition of news consumption and has recently launched OhmyNews International in English.

Will he find a willing audience in the United States? American television audiences are already familiar with “citizen witnesses” supplying news footage, from Rodney King to September 11. Online, from eBay to Craigslist.org, individuals are self-publishing commercial enterprises, and Weblogs have become a national hobby. On a more organized scale, About.com offers how-to advice from hundreds of self-posting experts around the nation, and Wikipedia.com is a self-posting encyclopedia where more than 6,000 active contributors have submitted 600,000 articles on countless topics.

So is a more active participation and interaction with news far behind? Oh thinks so. But he is quick to caution: “Technology itself cannot change society. Korean citizens were ready to participate. Only prepared people, who can use the merits of technology, can make a difference.”

ⓒ 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

 

SEOUL, South Korea - As a vigorous, debate-filled democracy becomes entrenched here, South Korea is rapidly dismantling the press club system, an enduring symbol of the collusive relationship between the government and the news media.

Starting a year ago at the presidential offices, known as the Blue House, press clubs - in which reporters from major media outlets excluded other journalists and decided what to report, sometimes in conjunction with government officials - have been eliminated in one government office after another. Where they survive, as in Seoul's Police Department, they are expected to go soon.

Instead, shiny new briefing rooms have been built, their doors flung open to all. Although journalists and government officials are still groping for a new balance in their relationship, most believe that the changes will lead to the emergence of something rare in East Asia: a fiercely independent press.

The dismantling of the deep-rooted press club system, a vestige of the Japanese colonial rule that ended in 1945, resulted from the confluence of several events. In 2002, President Roh Moo Hyun was elected despite the fierce opposition of traditional outlets, especially conservative newspapers and television networks. At the same time, Internet-based alternative sources of information, popular among the young and generally supportive of Mr. Roh, have emerged as rivals to the traditional media here in the world's most wired nation.

The speed of the change is particularly stunning because, in Japan, the press club system survives intact. Hyun Seung Yoon, 39, a reporter for The Korea Economic Daily and the former vice president of the Finance Ministry's press club, which was abolished on Dec. 29, said that in the past the government and the media were united.

"Fundamentally, it's better now," Mr. Hyun said. "It's healthier now. The relationship that existed before was a collusive one."

When Mr. Roh came to power a year and a half ago, a priority was to make the government's relationship with the media more open, and to give "equal opportunity to all media," said Jung Soon Kyun, the minister of the government information agency, who traveled to the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain to study how each government dealt with the media. The press club system had allowed the big media outlets to "monopolize information" and sometimes "offer and receive personal favors," said the minister, a former reporter.

For Mr. Roh, a political outsider who had not won the backing of the mainstream media during his election campaign, the abolition of the press club system also worked to his political advantage.

Under the old system, members of the major news outlets controlled membership and expelled organizations that failed to abide by club rules. The club decided, sometimes through a senior member acting as a liaison with the government, what news to focus on, what to play down or, in some cases, what to suppress.

The government paid for all the expenses the press club incurred, including phone bills, and even provided a secretary for the members. Until a few years ago, the government also paid for the reporters' air fare, hotel bills and other expenses whenever the president traveled.

Under the new system, the government charges each reporter assigned to the Blue House about $50 a month to cover various fees. With reporters for any news organization, big or small, free to register, the number of Blue House reporters has increased to more than 300 from 90.

Press clubs exist all over the country, from the Blue House to the ministries to police precincts, said Lee Jae Kyoung, a journalism professor at Ewha Womans University and a former television reporter.

"The loser was always going to be the reader, the people's right to know," Mr. Lee said.

Years ago, when Mr. Lee was a cub reporter covering a police precinct, the press club discovered some bad news involving a local tea manufacturer, he said. Instead of reporting the news, the club's senior members met with company officials, pocketed some cash and then treated the club members to a lavish dinner and drinks, he said.

South Korea's press club system, like its bureaucracy and legal systems, was a holdover from Japanese colonialism, said Youn Jung Suk, a professor at the Sejong Institute specializing in Japan-Korea relations. After the end of World War II and the end of Japanese colonialism, South Korea's American occupiers decided to retain the press club system.

"It was easy to control Korea through this system," Mr. Youn said.

South Korea's military leaders and a largely compliant press also shared the same belief, experts say, and so the movement to reform the press club system started only after South Korea began democratizing in the late 1980's.

In Japan, a de facto one-party state for the last half century, only maverick politicians in a few places, like Kamakura and Nagano, have abolished the press clubs, saying they are not appropriate in a democracy. Press clubs still exist in government agencies, companies and institutions all over the country, curtailing the nature and level of information available to the public.

The media revolution in South Korea has been almost completely ignored by Japan's own media, even though almost all have bureaus in Seoul. Japan's Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association argues that press clubs have officially been opened to non-members since 2002, though most Japanese journalists will acknowledge that, in practice, little has changed.

Hiroshi Wada, an official at Japan's newspaper association, went so far as to deny the changes occurring here.

"We checked the Korean situation and we do not think press clubs in South Korea have been abolished," Mr. Wada said. "It is that they allow everyone's participation freely, but press clubs still exist."

He added: "So it is not that Japan is more conservative with regards to press clubs. We understand that South Korea has caught up with us."

Here in South Korea, there had been previous attempts to abolish the press club system, notably under former President Kim Dae Jung's administration. But the resistance from the established media was too strong.

But in recent years, Internet-based news services, like OhmyNews.com, rose to challenge the big media outlets, and their influence has grown, particularly with the young.

In 2001, one of OhmyNews's reporters was barred from attending a news conference at Inchon Airport because he did not belong to its press club. Oh Yeon Ho, the news service's chief executive, sued and won.

"Only a few years earlier, people's acceptance of privileged media had been embedded in our culture," Mr. Oh said. "Now the idea of abolishing the press club has become mainstream."

In fact, Mr. Roh granted his first domestic interview as president to OhmyNews, signaling the beginning of a new era. The changes have been hard to swallow for the mainstream media, but most acknowledge that they have been positive.

"Without the press club system, we can no longer maintain embargoes or - it's an extreme example - even abolish news items," said Shin Kyoung Min, deputy managing director for MBC, a major television network. "Inside the press clubs, we did sometimes do that, though not often. The fact that everything is now open to all the media, that's a good change for everybody."

 

Three years ago, a crew of four people quietly launched the South Korean "citizen journalism" Web site OhmyNews. Since then, the site's full-time staff has grown to 53 -- including 35 full-time reporters and editors -- and the number of "citizen reporters" writing for the site has grown from 700 to about 26,700.

Citizen reporters submit about 200 articles every day, and about 1 million readers visit OhmyNews each day. The site mixes straight news reporting and commentary. Its influence at the grassroots level has been widely credited with helping President Roh Moo-hyun win the popular vote last December.

San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dan Gillmor wrote recently of the site: "OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model -- where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't -- into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic."

Oh Yeon-Ho, president and founder of OhmyNews, says his site changes the definition of journalism, of what a news story is and what a reporter is.

When it first launched, "the conventional media did not understand it, and there was an atmosphere that treated OhmyNews as heresy, saying, 'What the hell is that?,'" he said.

Oh Yeon-Ho is the author of five books and a doctoral candidate in journalism at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. In 1999, he received his master's degree in journalism at Regent University in Virginia. In 1988 he received his bachelor's degree in Korean language and literature from Yonsei University in South Korea.

From 1988 to 1999, he was a reporter and director of the news department for the alternative monthly magazine Mal. In 1986 he was imprisoned for one year for taking part in student protests against the South Korean government. He was born in the South Korean countryside in 1964.

I had confidence that citizen participation in journalism was something that citizens currently desired. But I could not imagine that the fire would spring into a blaze in such a short time.

Oh Yeon-Ho met recently with Japan Media Review associate editor Yeon-Jung Yu in his office in Seoul to talk about how the site got started -- and where it's going next. This is an edited excerpt of their conversation.

Q: The publication process of OhmyNews might be different from that of newspapers. Would you briefly explain it?

A: The citizen reporters and the full-time reporters write articles, the articles are reviewed by the editorial department, some of them are placed on the top, some are placed in the middle, some are placed at the bottom (of the front page).

Usually (the news is first posted) at 9:30 a.m., so that readers can see it after they come to the office, next at about 1 p.m. after lunch, and then at about 5 p.m., just before they leave the office.

Q: Was there a moment when you thought, "This is it!" when you launched OhmyNews?

A: Yes. In Korea, readers' dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional press had considerably increased. Citizens' desire to express themselves greatly increased. Thus, on the one hand, discontent with the conventional press, on the other hand, citizens desire to talk about themselves. These two things were joined together.

The reason the Internet was highly attractive was that I had little money and the Internet meant launching was relatively easy at first -- easier than paper newspapers. So I thought the Internet was the space where a few people who possessed nothing could bring about results using guerrilla methods.

I thought up our motto, slogan, or concept -- "every citizen is a reporter" -- when I was a reporter for the monthly, Mal. Because the magazine Mal was not mainstream media but alternative media, I had to have that kind of determination or attitude. Only when I was armored with the philosophy of "every citizen is a reporter" could I equally compete with the reporters of the mainstream media.

The motto "every citizen is a reporter" has modesty as well as confidence. That is, no matter how small the alternative media I was working for as a reporter, I could be arrogant because of the fact that I was a reporter. And, even though I had a reporter's license, it had the meaning that I was not above a general citizen. So "every citizen is a reporter" means on the one hand, confidence, and on the other hand, modesty.

We do not regard objective reporting as a source of pride. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.

So, while I was a journalist for Mal, I continuously thought about things like how I could change journalism -- so that not only professional journalists, but also citizens participated in it. I thought of the idea for more than 10 years. However, because there was no Internet at that time, because there was no such concept as the Internet, it seemed it would cost too much if I made it with paper. Then the Internet came out and I thought, "Ah, I could do it through this space!"

Q: As a pioneer, you might have faced unique difficulties. If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?

A: First of all, (OhmyNews) was the complete demolition of conventional media logic and of the concept of journalists. "Every citizen is a reporter" means destruction of the concept of reporters and also the destruction of the concept of articles.

The conventional media did not understand it, and there was an atmosphere that treated OhmyNews as heresy, saying, "What the hell is that?"

Among the various difficulties, the real one was the problem of funding. At first it was impossible to find investors. For two years -- no, three years -- every month we had a deficit of about 20 million won (about $17,000). We agonized about this a lot. Since last October, we have barely managed to turn a profit.

Q: Can you describe how fast OhmyNews grew?

A: Yes, the number of staff grew from four to 53. The citizen reporters numbered 727 people when we first published, now the figure has almost reached 27,000. During the early days, citizen reporters submitted about 10 articles a day; now they submit about 200 articles.

The number of visitors when it was first published was about 600. During the general election, the peak reached 2 to 3 million, of course now, because the general election is finished, the number has fallen. About 1 million a day. But this is not very accurate. In many ways, it is true that OhmyNews grew in a short time.

Q: Then did you expect such fast growth?

A: I did not expect that much. I had confidence that citizen participation in journalism was something that citizens currently desired. But I could not imagine that the fire would spring into a blaze in such a short time.

Q: I heard that a weekly paper of OhmyNews came out.

A: Since last April, we do it as an offline complement (for readers who cannot use the Internet and) for the readers who look for some unique power or the charm of a paper newspaper. Also, because there are some advertising sponsors who say "We don't do Internet advertisements, we only do paper advertisements."

The Internet was the space where a few people who possessed nothing could bring about results using guerrilla methods.

Q: What is the reason that you insisted on an Internet newspaper?

A: As I said earlier, the Internet is an open space where the concept "every citizen is a reporter" can be best realized. Internet space does not have any limitations of either time or space, does it? Paper newspapers have limitations of time and space. Wherever there is a limitation of time and space, this cannot help but limit the participants, isn't it so? But where there is no limitation of time and space, anyone can participate. So it is the most proper place to realize "every citizen is a reporter."

Q: How do you adapt to the rapidly changing Internet culture and technology?

A: I had been ignorant of technology because I grew up in a real countryside. I was the kind of person who hated technology. Even until I was a high school student, I was the kind of person who gathered firewood carrying a coolie rack in mountains. Even now, although I use the Internet a lot, it is not that I understand technology much. I newly hired a vice president who is good at that.

Q: Do you affiliate with mobile communication corporations?

A: We are doing so now (distributing content to cell phones and other mobile devices). That is also one of our sources of revenue. We started this about two months ago. The readership grew to 40,000 in two months, so the reaction has been pretty good.

The age of competing through the name card "I am a New York Times reporter" has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner.

Q: What is your philosophy on newspapers? What standards should good newspapers meet? What kind of newspaper do you want OhmyNews to be?

A: In terms of the title of OhmyNews, the "Oh" in OhmyNews is an exclamation. "Oh!" Like when you say "Oh, my God!"

When I define news, news makes reporters run. But better news makes reporters' hearts beat. So "Oh" came from that. When reporters' hearts beat, the exclamation "Oh" comes out, doesn't it? So I named OhmyNews to mean that when a situation that makes one's heart beat.

"MyNews" means you write your own news.

Q: In another interview, you said, "We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves." This seems different from the view of traditional journalism, where objective reporting is valued.

A: We do not regard objective reporting as a source of pride. OhmyNews does not regard straight news articles as the standard. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.

Thus, we not only break the concept of "who reporters are," but also break the formula of "reporters are supposed to be like blah, blah, blah." To us, every citizen is a reporter, and citizens have no practice writing straight articles, so how could they do it? They just communicate in their own ways.

If you ask a shopkeeper to communicate in the professional reporter's format, he would not be able to, would he? So we teach them to break the formula for articles because the formula for articles was made by professional reporters working for paper newspapers.

Of course, I do not mean that someone should never use the article format made by the professional reporters of paper newspapers. We also use them a lot, actually.

Q: Some question the quality or objectivity of OhmyNews. What do you think about that?

A: Professional newspaper reporters might think like that. In some articles, some parts where the quality or objectivity is questionable do exist. Even elementary students write for us. Housewives also write.

When a professional looks at an article by a non-professional, it is possible that he thinks the quality of the article is not good enough. Yet, for the same article, is it not possible that another reader might think it very coarse but beautiful?

Q: Then are there no eligibility requirements to become an OhmyNews reporter?

A: We have never had that. When a professional looks at an article by a non-professional, it is possible that he thinks the quality of the article is not good enough. Yet, for the same article, is it not possible that another reader might think it very coarse but beautiful?

I mean that fluency does not always make an article good. In this way, an article can be considered in a different way, and among our citizen reporters, professionals from all spheres, such as professors, lawyers, and government employees, are also citizen reporters. There is an infinite variety. Therefore, it is right to claim that the OhmyNews articles are of variable quality, but it is not right to think that the quality is not competent.

Q: There is criticism that OhmyNews supports a specific party or President Roh. What would you say about that?

A: During the general election, (many said) we supported the individual, Roh Moo-hyun. It is true that we reported the Roh Moo-hyun phenomenon a lot -- that is, we covered Roh Moo-hyun's popularity with young voters, and the hope many had that we would change something in the old politics through Roh Moo-hyun.

If there were no OhmyNews, shaping that kind of current could be less complete. There is a perception that that kind of young people's desire, the desire for the reformation of politics, erupted through the space called OhmyNews. We evaluated the news value (of the youth political movement and of Roh Moo-hyun, and decided) they were very new and had sufficient news value, so we reported on it a great deal.

The mainstream media underestimated and undervalued (these stories) quite a bit. So we never feel ashamed of or answer in the negative to this implication that OhmyNews had a definite influence on the election of Roh Moo-hyun. At first, it was not that we supported Roh Moo-hyun as a candidate, an individual, but we just reported this because it was newsworthy.

Q: What do you think about the criticism that the main articles are written by full-time reporters, while the names of citizen reporters are exploited?

A: For instance, Chung Joo-young (founder and former president of the Hyundai Corporations) died. It is very difficult for an article like this to be covered by a citizen reporter quickly, isn't it? It's natural for full-time reporters to cover these stories.

But if 250 articles come up a day, 200 of them are by citizen reporters. So, as to quantity, still 80 percent are being written by citizen reporters. But from the aspect of placement, if you only consider which articles are shown on the top, this percentage would decrease.

But the thing we should think about here is that most full-time reporters inside were once citizen reporters. Among them, about 80 percent. So people who wrote well in the past, these people have now become the regular army from guerrillas. So we don't have to see things negatively, I think.

Q: What are the criteria for selecting citizen reporters' articles?

A: They might be similar to those for ordinary articles. Beginning with current events, how much sympathy the articles will arouse, how lively they are and how much social impact the articles will have.

Q: What are the criteria for the paper OhmyNews?

A: The publication process for our paper version is very simple. The concept of it is "Best of OhmyNews" rather than doing something new. It has the meaning of recycling by selecting things that were on there and would be valuable even after being transferred to paper. Thus, it is not that we pour major manpower into it.

Q: Are the topics that OhmyNews covers similar to those of other newspapers?

A: We focus on politics, society and citizens. Other topics such as culture are covered by the citizen reporters.

Q: Are you willing to head in a new direction?

A: We are trying to do Internet TV regularly. That is, we are trying to post the motion pictures that citizen reporters have recorded, just as they post articles. Nowadays, we are doing this in our spare time, we are trying to regularize it.

Q: Do you have any obstacles to further growth?

A: Since we have become a little bit bigger, it seems like the existing mainstream media are holding us in check. For instance, it seems that they exaggerate a small mistake that they might have ignored before, exaggerate the ill effects of the citizen reporter system, or intend to weaken the influence of OhmyNews, but in terms of those things we could ignore them.

Q: How much is your revenue and what is the source?

A: Our income is about 2.6 billion won (about $2.2 million) a month and expenses are about 2.5 billion won (about $2.1 million), so 10 million won (about $8,525) in the black per month. Seventy percent of the overall income comes from advertisements.

Q: What do you think of the future of Internet newspapers in Korea and the world?

A: I think that paper newspapers will continuously have a certain level of influence, yet slowly but continuously their authority will decrease. And I think the influence of Internet media will gradually expand.

Q: Can you give some advice to those who model OhmyNews, including JanJan of Japan?

A: For something like OhmyNews to succeed, the participation of citizens is essential. I mean that the network of the Internet alone is not enough, and also the mere dissatisfaction with the conventional press is not enough.

Also, the enthusiasm of the leader alone is not enough. It would be good to research how to make citizens participate and prepare on time. You can never succeed only by pouring in lots of money. Why did citizens participate even though we didn't give them much money?

But when someone writes an article, he gets paid only 1,000 won (about 85 cents), whether he writes 10 pages or 100 pages. Isn't that even less than one U.S. dollar? Nevertheless, he wrote an article for OhmyNews by investing his time and energy. Then why does he do it?

They should research why such participation was possible and make it possible in their own countries, but they could not make it by spending money. I understand there is not much participation by citizens in JanJan, this might be the central difficulty.

Q: Any final comment?

A: In my opinion, nowadays journalism is changing. The form of 20th century journalism and the form of 21st century journalism will be fundamentally different. For 21st century journalism, if a reader wants to, he can convert himself into a reporter and this is realized through the Internet.

Someone might think that this is the unique situation of Korea and OhmyNews, but I think it is not. Even in countries where they don't have OhmyNews, citizens act as reporters whether they recognize it or not. Through Yahoo discussion space or the Readers' Opinions section of The New York Times, they are already affecting professional journalists.

In the old days, didn't readers send their letters to newspaper companies and the companies edited them? It is not true now. Now citizens are publishing one-person newspapers -- blogs.

Where professional reporters once exercised their influence exclusively, now they compete with citizens, so professional journalists could be in trouble if they still try to confront general readers with their authority and arrogance.

Now professional journalists have to survive not only competition among themselves, but also from that with ordinary netizens. The only way to compete now is through the quality of their articles. That means that the age of competing through the name card "I am a New York Times reporter" has gone. When a New York Times reporter writes an article and an ordinary citizen -- whether he is a professor or a neighbor -- writes an article criticizing it splendidly, then the citizen becomes the winner.

So it is not important that I am a reporter from an authoritative newspaper company at all. I mean, now the quality of articles is important. Thus, it is necessary that the reporters quickly figure out how the world is changing and that they change themselves along with it.

 

SEOUL - Lee Bong-Ryul has a day job as an engineer at a semiconductor company. In his spare time, he's helping to shape tomorrow's journalism.

Lee is an active ``citizen-reporter'' for OhmyNews, an online news service. Only 4 years old, the publication has already shaken up the South Korean journalism and political establishments while attracting an enormous audience

OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

Even taxi drivers who don't have time for newspapers have heard of OhmyNews. The site draws millions of visitors daily. Advertisers are supporting both the Korean-language Web site (www.ohmy news.com) and a weekly print edition, and the operation has been profitable in recent months, according to its chief executive and founder, Oh Yeon-Ho.

Oh is a 38-year-old former writer for progressive magazines. With a staff of about 50 and legions of ``citizen-reporter'' contributors -- more than 26,000 have signed up, and more than 15,000 have published stories under their bylines -- Oh and his colleagues are creating something entirely new.

``The main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,'' he says. ``We changed the concept of the reporter.''

The old way meant becoming a professional journalist and getting a press card -- a credentialed and somewhat elevated position in South Korean society. (I know that must sound bizarre to readers in the United States, where we journalists enjoy roughly the same public esteem as politicians and used-car salesmen.)

The new way, Oh says, is that ``a reporter is the one who has the news and who is trying to inform others.''

The paper's citizen-reporters go into issues that the mainstream media haven't covered, says Jeong Woon-Hyeon, the chief editor.

The site posts about 70 percent of the roughly 200 items submitted each day, after staff editors look at the stories. Postings work on a hierarchy corresponding to their place on the page; the lower the headline appears, the less important or interesting the editors consider it. The higher and more newsworthy the story, the more the freelance contributor gets paid.

The idea isn't entirely new. News organizations have long used stringers, who contribute freelance articles.

What's so different here is that anyone can sign up, and it's not difficult to get published. The Web means space for news is essentially unlimited, and OhmyNews welcomes contributions from just about anyone.

The real-people nature of the contributors lends further appeal to the site. The citizen-reporters do cover politics, economy, culture, arts and science -- the usual subjects you'll find in newspapers -- but they tend to focus more on personally oriented issues like education, job conditions and the environment.

While about 85 percent of the online edition is written by the citizen-reporters, about 90 percent of the weekly print edition is written by the staff.

OhmyNews reflects its bosses' passion for going beyond the conservative papers' constrained view of the world. By several accounts, its coverage of events such as the death of two schoolgirls crushed by a U.S. Army vehicle in an accident last summer has forced the hand of mainstream media that were downplaying the story. Protest demonstrations after that incident evolved into nationwide anger against the United States and a profoundly nationalist fervor that helped elect Roh.

Oh and Jeong reject the perception that OhmyNews is somehow linked to the new government. Clearly, though, they have vastly more in common politically with the semi-reformist regime than the one it replaced, just as they are poles apart from the mass media that were widely seen as supporters of Roh's predecessors.

Oh's rise from underground-magazine writer to powerful media figure has any number of ironies.

One is that the government he disliked was instrumental in wiring the nation for high-speed data access, creating the conditions that ultimately gave OhmyNews an opening. In this wired nation, more than two-thirds of households are connected to the Internet, most with high-speed links. The Internet is an always-on part of everyday life, not an afterthought.

There's the way he came to realize that he should start OhmyNews. He went to the United States from 1997 to 1999 to get a master's degree at Regent University in Virginia. The school's president was Pat Robertson, the evangelist and right-wing political figure.

To know America, Oh says he was told by a journalist friend, you have to know how the conservative right operates. In Robertson's case, part of the operation was counteracting what conservatives saw (and continue to see) as a liberal-oriented mainstream press. Robertson's method was to start his own media outlets.

Regent offered media courses. ``I learned their techniques,'' he says. ``But my approach is quite different.''

In one course, students' homework was to create a new media organization, at least on paper. Oh's imaginary company was the genesis of OhmyNews. (``I got an A-plus,'' he says wryly.)

The vision was to use the Internet, which was then growing like crazy, to tap the power of average people who, Oh strongly believed, didn't back South Korea's government and weren't represented by the conservative media companies that controlled about 80 percent of daily circulation.

OhmyNews' ambitions aren't limited to mere words. It runs video Webcasting services and plans to expand its multimedia presence. Someday, citizen-reporters could be contributing video reports, not just text, in a dazzling, multidirectional sharing of information.

Oh and his colleagues know that the interactive nature of the medium extends far beyond OhmyNews' appeals for contributions from citizen-reporters. Each story has a link to a comments page. Readers can, and do, post comments ranging from supportive to harsh, and they can vote on whether they approve or disapprove of specific comments.

Before joining OhmyNews, Lee was posting politically oriented items to several online bulletin boards, getting little if any response.

OhmyNews, he says, changed the equation. Here, at last, was a publication that reflected some of his views on politics and society -- and that was glad to publish what he wrote.

He doesn't do it for the money. Stories that make the OhmyNews equivalent of the front page earn him about $20, the top rate. He gets commensurately less for stories that run lower on the page and figures he makes between $50 and $100 a month in freelance payments -- not a pittance but hardly a fortune.

Lee has no ambitions to be a professional writer. ``I don't think I'm qualified,'' he says. But he believes he gets, on balance, a greater response for the kinds of stories he writes -- about regular people's lives -- than some of the professional journalism that runs in the newspapers and on the site every day.

The easy coexistence of the amateurs and professionals will, soon enough, seem natural. Publications like OhmyNews will pop up everywhere, because they make sense, combining the best of old and new journalistic forms.

OhmyNews is an experiment in tomorrow. So far, it's looking like a brilliant one.

 

SEOUL, South Korea (AP Online) Three-year-old South Korean Internet news service Ohmynews where the public reports on everything from local happenings to gossip and national politics has become so popular that Roh Moo-hyun granted it his first interview after being inaugurated as president in February. The Internet has spawned a new type of journalism in South Korea, including Ohmynews, an increasingly popular site where doctors, students, professors and housekeepers work as "citizen reporters."

"With Ohmynews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media," said its editor and founder, Oh Yeon-ho.

"Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

But Ohmynews's methods have raised concerns about the quality and objectivity of its reporting which, according to its own figures, is read by an estimated 1.2 million people daily.

"Marketing people and activists can pose as journalists to promote their own products and ideas," said Choi Joon-suk, a senior editor at South Korea's largest printed newspaper, Chosun Ilbo. "The quality of the online media is a huge problem."

Oh disagrees. All stories are fact checked and edited by professional reporters before being posted on the Internet, he said. Only two stories have led to defamation cases.

More than 26,300 readers have registered to be citizen reporters. They write about 200 stories a day.

Ohmynews this week published a string of articles ranging from Roh's trip to Washington to discuss the North Korean nuclear crisis to some more local matters.

One citizen reporter wrote a story alleging the nephew of a provincial mayor illegally drew a loan from a farmers' cooperative.

Another wrote a first-person account of her husband preparing her a birthday breakfast.

It begins: "Yesterday was my birthday. My darling husband got up early and I could hear him bustling about in the kitchen preparing the breakfast for me..."

About 80% of the electronic newspaper's content comes from the public and the rest from Ohmynews's team of 38 professional reporters and editors.

Pay for a citizen reporter's article ranges from nothing to $16, depending on its importance.

Ohmynews's influence was highlighted after an American military armored vehicle ran down and killed two South Korean schoolgirls last June.

While the accident attracted relatively little attention in the mainstream press initially, Ohmynews was aggressive in its coverage. The stories prompted one "citizen reporter" to call for protests.

The idea snowballed and South Korea experienced some of its largest anti-U.S. demonstrations in years and calls for a review of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance.

Mainstream newspapers later criticized Ohmynews, questioning whether it was ethical for a so-called reporter to incite demonstrations.

The fast rise in popularity of Ohmynews, and other online news services, is partly attributable to South Korea's high Internet use. About 70% of homes have high-speed broadband Internet access connections ? more than anywhere else in the world.

Paik Hak-soon, a political analyst at the Sejong Institute research center, said "the mainstream press still has the ear of the majority of the public. But things are changing."

"Twenty- and 30-year-olds are getting their news from the Internet," he said.

The site, which is in Korean, is located at ohmynews.com.

Story location : https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58856,00.html

02:00 AM May. 17, 2003 PT

 

In the West, people with a journalistic bent turn to weblogs to exercise the urge to publish news or comment on events of the day.

But in South Korea, the publishing instinct is directed toward a big, collaborative online newspaper that has emerged as one of the country's most influential media outlets.

OhmyNews is a unique experiment in "citizen journalism": Anyone who registers with the site can become a paid reporter.

"With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media," said editor and founder, Oh Yeon-ho. "Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

Launched three years ago, OhmyNews has grown from a staff of four to more than 40 editors and reporters who publish about 200 stories a day. The vast majority of the news, however, is written by more than 26,000 registered citizen journalists, who come from all walks of life, from chambermaids to professional writers.

The site attracts an estimated 2 million daily readers, and has been widely credited with helping to elect South Korea's new progressive president, Roh Moo-hyun. The Guardian newspaper called OhmyNews "arguably the world's most domestically powerful news site."

"OhmyNews is as influential as any newspaper," a South Korean diplomat told the paper. "No policy maker can afford to ignore it. South Korea is changing in ways that we cannot believe ourselves."

OhmyNews was founded in 2000 by Oh, a veteran investigative journalist, in reaction to the country's entrenched conservative media. Oh's intention was to publish material that would make readers sit up in exclamation, hence its name -- a play on "Oh my God!" Oh didn't have any money. A website written by amateurs was his only option.

Calling itself a "news guerilla organization" -- and adopting the motto, "Every Citizen is a Reporter" -- OhmyNews has become a wild, inconsistent, unpredictable blend of the Drudge Report, Slashdot and a traditional, but partisan, newspaper.

OhmyNews tends to be anticorporate, antigovernment and anti-American. Stories are often subjective, oozing with emotion and odd personal tidbits. But they also can be passionate, detailed and knowledgeably written. The site covers everything a traditional newspaper covers -- from sports to international politics -- but does it with heaps of personality.

"It's entertaining, it's heartfelt and it's caring," said Don Park, a Korean-American reader who said he visits OhmyNews daily. "It's like blogs. It has a personal side and an emotional side. It has human texture. It's not bland and objective like traditional news. There's a definite bias. It's not professional, but you get the facts…. I trust it."

Park said he'd love to see something like OhmyNews in the United States. Bored with what he sees as the button-down objectivity of U.S. media, he's sophisticated enough to read between the lines or take stories with a pinch of salt.

OhmyNews may not be The Washington Post, but it has enjoyed its fair share of scoops, gripping eyewitness accounts and heavy-hitting op-ed comment (one post recently got a Japanese sports editor fired for making disparaging comments about Korea).

OhmyNews reporters are given access to government ministries and public institutions, putting them on level footing with professional reporters. Top officials increasingly give OhmyNews journalists exclusive interviews, a precedent set by President Roh, who gave his first postelection interview to OhmyNews -- a startling snub of the country's established media.

OhmyNews reporters are given free reign to post anything they like on the site. The only requirement is that they use their real identities. The site warns contributors that they bear sole responsibility for whatever they post. Copyright is shared between the site and the reporter, who is free to republish the material elsewhere.

The pay ranges from nothing to about $16, depending on how a story is ranked by the editors -- "basic," "bonus" or "special."

The production process resembles a traditional newspaper, but is conducted in public rather than behind closed doors. Discussion forums on the site allow reporters and editors to discuss story ideas with citizen contributors. If an idea has legs, a citizen reporter will pick it up and report it on their own time and expense.

Stories are submitted through a Web interface and enter an editing queue before going live. According to Oh, all stories are fact checked and edited by professional editors. Only two stories have led to defamation cases, he said.

The system is not perfect. In fact, it appears to be somewhat fast and loose. OhmyNews has published hoaxes, including a report of the assassination of Bill Gates generated by a fake CNN news site. Several articles have been retracted, and there are ongoing problems with reporters' undisclosed conflicts of interest.

"Marketing people and activists can pose as journalists to promote their own products and ideas," said Choi Joon-suk, a senior editor at South Korea's largest printed newspaper, Chosun Ilbo. "The quality of the online media is a huge problem."

Of course, as the story of The New York Times' rogue reporter Jayson Blair attests, problems with accuracy and truthfulness aren't limited to sites like OhmyNews. In response, OhmyNews is currently trying to purge its membership of phony identities by insisting that contributors disclose bank account details.

Whatever the problems, the site continues to exert a profound influence on Korean culture, which is arguably the most "wired" on the planet. About 70 percent of the population has access to a broadband Internet connection, and many aspects of South Korean daily life are conducted online, including political opinion making. South Korea has been dubbed one of the world's leading "Webocracies."

South Korea's President Roh had better watch out. His brief honeymoon with OhmyNews appears to be over. Thanks to his cozying up to President Bush during this week's summit in Washington, D.C., OhmyNews contributors are turning on him.

"He's kissing Mr. Bush's ass," someone posted on the site in a comment typical of the OhmyNews sentiment. Just as the revolutionary publication helped elect Roh, it surely can help depose him.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

 

SEOUL, South Korea For years, people will be debating what made this country go from conservative to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth culture and from staunchly pro-American to a deeply ambivalent ally all seemingly overnight.

For most here, the change is symbolized by the election in December of Roh Moo Hyun, a reformist lawyer with a disarmingly unfussy style who at 56 is youthful by South Korean political standards. But for many observers, the most important agent of change has been the Internet.

By some measures, South Korea is the most wired country in the world, with broadband connections in nearly 70 percent of households. In the last year, as the elections were approaching, more and more people were getting their information and political analysis from spunky news services on the Internet instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers.

Most influential by far has been a feisty three-year-old start up with the unusual name of OhmyNews. Around election time the free online news service was registering 20 million page views per day.

Although things have cooled down a bit, even these days the service averages about 14 million visits daily, in a country of only about 40 million people.

The online newspaper, which began with only four employees, started as a glimmer in the eye of Oh Yeon Ho, now 38, a lifelong journalistic rabble rouser who wrote for underground progressive magazines during the long years of dictatorship here.

Its name, OhmyNews, a play on the expression "Oh my God!" which entered the Korean language by way of a comedian who popularized it around the time the online service was founded in 2000.

Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about everything from local happenings and personal musings to national politics.

Only 20 percent of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. So far, a computer check shows, there have been more than 10,000 other bylines.

The newspaper deals with questions of objectivity and accuracy by grading articles according to their content. Those that are presented as straight news are fact-checked by editors. Writers are paid small amounts, which vary according to how the stories are ranked, using forestry terminology, from "kindling" to "rare species."

"My goal was to say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the concept that every citizen is a reporter," said Mr. Oh, a wiry, intense man whose mobile phone never stops ringing ?and who insists his name has no connection with the newspaper's.

"The professional news culture has eroded our journalism," he said, "and I have always wanted to revitalize it. Since I had no money, I decided to use the Internet, which has made this guerrilla strategy possible."

The kind of immediacy this brand of journalism can bring to a story was brought home again in late January by the dispatches of a firefighter from the central city of Taegu, who sent gripping accounts of the subway arson disaster there, which killed nearly 200 people.

More pertinent to the impact OhmyNews has had on the country's political culture were reports the service ran last summer after two schoolgirls were crushed to death by a United States Army armored vehicle on patrol.

OhmyNews's reports of the incident were widely seen as forcing the hand of the mainstream media to pay attention to a story that conservative tradition here suggests they might have been inclined to ignore.

The rest is, as they say, history: a series of demonstrations against the Army presence here snowballed in the fall and winter, becoming a huge national movement that many see as having propelled the candidacy of Mr. Roh.

The new president was, until then, a relative unknown and third in a field of three major candidates. If no one else caught on to this link, Mr. Roh appears to have. After his election, he granted OhmyNews the first interview he gave to any Korean news organization.

For Mr. Oh, the story of the American military accident had echoes of one of his first big scoops, a story he wrote as a little-known freelance journalist in 1994 on the No Gun Ri incident, a reported massacre of South Korean refugees by United States military forces who opened fire on them at a railroad trestle in the summer of 1950, during the Korean War.

The South Korean press made almost no mention of his reports after he broke the story, but five years later The Associated Press wrote about the incident, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its subsequent investigation with American Army veterans.

"Once the American media picked up the story, our mainstream newspapers wrote about No Gun Ri as if it was a fresh incident," Mr. Oh said. "This made me realize that we have a real imbalance in our media, 80 percent conservative and 20 percent liberal, and it needed to be corrected. My goal is 50-50."

After he broke the No Gun Ri story, Mr. Oh went away to school in the United States, earning a master's degree at the conservative, explicitly Christian Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., whose president is the evangelist pastor Pat Robertson. It might have seemed like an unlikely choice, but Mr. Oh said it was deliberate.

"Pat Robertson and I are very different in temperament and ideology, but we are very similar in strategy," said Mr. Oh, who became what he calls a serious Christian during his stay in the United States. "They are very right-wing and wanted to overthrow what they saw as a liberal media establishment. I wanted to overthrow a right-wing media establishment, and I learned a lot from them."

Although OhmyNews pays its staff less than reporters earn at the top South Korean newspapers, morale appears to very high. "Wherever I go, people ask me, `What about the pay?' " said Son Byung Kwan, 31, a reporter who helped break the story about the American soldiers' accident. "I took a 30 percent pay cut to work here, but things couldn't be better. My company is so famous that I have become well known, and best of all, my stories have real impact."

 

They are called the 386 generation in South Korea - people in their 30s, educated in the 1980s and born in the 1960s.

"My generation, the 386 generation, were in the streets fighting in the 80s against the military dictatorship. Now, 20 years later, we are combat-ready with our internet," he said at his office in downtown Seoul.

"We really want to be part of forming public opinion - and all of us, all of the 386 generation are now deployed with the internet, ready to fight."

Three years ago, Mr Oh turned to the internet in his battle to create a new form of journalism in South Korea.

The country's media, once stifled under decades of military dictatorship, is still today predominantly conservative and owned by influential business and political figures.

Today, his internet newspaper OhmyNews is one of the country's most powerful news services.

Its reports on the deaths of two South Korean schoolgirls, run down by an American armoured military vehicle last June, prompted one reader to call for demonstrations.

The idea snowballed, and led to some of the largest displays of anti-American sentiment in the country in recent years.

The paper also played a part in helping to swing public opinion behind Roh Moo-hyun during December's presidential election campaign.

At that time, OhmyNews registered as many as 20 million hits a day, although it has now settled down to around 15 million hits.

Mr Oh sees the outcome of the election as a victory for the alternative media in South Korea.

"In the past, the conservative papers in Korea could - and did - lead public opinion. They had the monopoly. They were against Roh Moo-hyun's candidacy. But OhmyNews supported the Roh Moo-hyun phenomenon, with all the netizens participating.

"In our battle between the conservative media and the netizens of Korea, the netizens won," he said.

"The concept of our paper is that all citizens can participate" - Oh Yeon-ho

New media

The internet is where many South Koreans, particularly the younger generation, get their news first, bypassing the traditional media.

The country is one of the most wired in the world, with nearly 70% of households enjoying broadband connections.

There are now several internet newspapers in South Korea, but OhmyNews is the most popular - and one of the most radical.

It was launched by Mr Oh, who used to write for radical underground magazines three years ago.

"I launched OhmyNews on 22 February, in the year 2000 at 2.22pm. That was my farewell to the journalism of the 20th Century," he said, smiling.

Empowerment

His goal was to change the news culture into one in which the public was involved in producing, as well as reading, the news.

"It was a one-way street before", said Mr Oh. "The concept of our paper is that all citizens can participate," he said.

His goal succeeded. The paper has a professional staff of just 41, and 23,000 "citizen reporters" who send in news reports on just about anything, and determine OhmyNews' editorial policy.

Articles are rigorously fact-checked by in-house staff; but only a handful are re-written or republished, and just two articles have ended up in legal action in the courts.

Pay for the "citizen reporters" varies from nothing to just under $20, but the top stories will be carried with the writer's by-line and the knowledge that millions of people could be reading their article.

The paper's staff are not resting on their laurels, however. They want to broaden their audience, strengthen their network of citizens reporters and encourage more video and picture contributions.

They are proud of their success and growing influence.

OhmyNews boasts a string of scoops, including recent revelations that the Hyundai group paid hundreds of millions of dollars secretly to North Korea just before the historic inter-Korean summit three years ago.

It has also won battles in getting previously closed press rooms at government ministries opened up to wider media outlets.

And just in case you're wondering about the name? OhmyNews was a play on the phrase "Oh my God" which became a catchphrase of a popular comedian.

"It wasn't connected to my surname," laughed Mr Oh.

"I just wanted to show that the name underlined my belief that all citizens can be reporters; and the word Oh - its like you are surprised, when you see something that really has news value and you get excited about it," he said.

 

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - The marriage of a fledgling democracy and broadband technology has spawned a precocious new media child in South Korea that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago.

In an exhilarating two months, Web-based journalists have swung a presidential election, stirred tens of thousands of Koreans into anti-American protests, and nudged government policy on the nuclear standoff with the North.

The leading voice of this New Korea is OhmyNews, South Korea's most influential online news site. With only 40 full-time journalists, it has built up almost as big a readership and as fearsome a reputation for moving public opinion as dailies that have been established for more than half a century.

"OhmyNews is as influential as any newspaper," says a South Korea diplomat in Tokyo. "No policymaker can afford to ignore it. South Korea is changing in ways that we cannot believe ourselves."

Until 1987, South Korea was under a military dictatorship and the press was firmly under the thumb of the authorities. But huge and bloody pro-democracy demonstrations forced General Roh Tae-woo to accept direct presidential elections and freedom of expression.

Liberated from government censors, TV stations and newspapers are now routinely critical of the country's leaders. In 1997, this contributed to the first transfer of power to an opposition candidate, the former dissident Kim Dae-jung, who had once been imprisoned and sentenced to death.

Under President Kim, the young democracy received a technological boost with the spread of broadband Internet access - embraced far more quickly in South Korea than anywhere else in the world. The rigidly hierarchical society was suddenly turned on its head by the Internet, which young South Koreans turned to first for their news.

Some 67 percent of Korean households now have broadband, more than in any other country. This high-speed service means that people use the Internet more, spending an average of 1,340 minutes online per month. About 54 percent of Koreans play online games - another world record.

"The Internet is so important here," says a Western diplomat in Seoul. "This is the most on-line country in the world. The younger generation get all their information from the Web. Some don't even bother with TVs. They just download the programs."

Unlike the established media, the editorial policy of OhmyNews is largely decided by its 23,000 contributors - who are paid between nothing and $8 per story - and its 3 million very active readers, who can vote and comment on every published article.

In last month's presidential election, readers vetoed editorial comment by the publication's owner Oh Yeon-ho and his staff. They made their own preferences clear with thousands of contributions urging people to get out and vote for the eventual winner: Roh Moo-hyun.

Polls showed that the victory of Mr. Roh - who claims to be the world's first president to understand HTML website coding - came from a huge surge of support from the Internet generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings. In South Korea, where elections are usually decided by regional rather than generational loyalties, this was a dramatic development. It was not the last.

A report in OhmyNews on an accident in which two schoolgirls were crushed to death by a US Army tractor prompted one reader to call for demonstrations. The editors supported the idea and within a week, South Korea was witnessing the biggest anti-American protests in the country's history.

"We are becoming very powerful," says Bae Eul-sun, one of Ohmy's online journalists. Slouched in front of a computer in a scruffy Seoul office, she looks more like a grad-school student than an increasingly important player in national politics.

"The pay is lousy, but it is very satisfying to work here because I really feel like I can change the world little by little," she says.

When the new administration takes over Feb. 25, its external priorities will essentially mark a continuation of the "Sunshine Policy" of the outgoing Kim, who focussed on maintaining a strong alliance with the US, while engaging with North Korea.

But Yoon Yong-kwan, head of foreign policy formulation in Roh's transitional team, says policy toward North Korea would be developed to better reflect public opinion.

This is likely to give more influence to domestic media, such as OhmyNews, and less to Washington. Compared to the last North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993-94, Seoul has taken a far more active role in trying to head off a confrontation - even at the expense of infuriating its ally. With online polls showing most Koreans are more frightened by Washington than by Pyongyang, Roh has been outspoken in criticizing US plans for sanctions. Earlier this month, South Korea dispatched envoys to Beijing and Moscow on what was effectively a mission to build a coalition against the tough stance taken by America.

Kim and Roh - both former civil rights activists - have their own agendas. Yet even though they are not acting merely on the whims of Internet polls, the articles, comments, and feedback in OhmyNews and other smaller online sites provide them at the very least with a justification for taking a softer line with the North.

"The development of Internet technology has changed the whole political dynamic in South Korea to an extent that the outside world has not yet grasped," Mr. Yoon says. "The emergence of the online press has balanced the political debate between progressives and conservatives. It will affect foreign policy."